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Robot restaurant

Here's a great idea from Nuremberg in Germany. A fully-automated restaurant, with the curious name of 's Baggers. Order your food on a touchscreen at your table, and everything arrives on a special spiraling track from the kitchen above.

It reminds me of the kitchen scene at the beginning of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1986), where Caractacus Potts serves up breakfast on an extraordinary contraption with wheels, cogs and conveyor belts.

It's also a bit like uWink, the new concept restaurant chain by Pong and Chuck E Cheese's creator Nolan Bushnell, where tabletop touchscreens let you order food and drinks, play games, take quizzes and pay in 11 different languages. But 's Baggers takes this futuristic service one step further – by eliminating the server altogether.

Not that I want to put waiters out of work – quite the opposite. But the tech behind this is really clever, and I'm willing to bet we see way more robot restaurants soon. Oh, and just in case you're worried about the food, it's made by real chefs. RM